


everything floats down here

by piggy09



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-29
Updated: 2017-01-29
Packaged: 2018-09-20 13:25:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9493394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: Rachel, after Sarah leaves her in the basement of Westmorland's house.





	

**Author's Note:**

> [warning: blood, canon-typical violence]

Sarah stumbles out the door and Rachel stands there and breathes. Eventually she remembers that she is holding the gun. The question: now what. Now what does she do. Hunt down Sarah, that’s the obvious answer. Rachel can hear her making her clumsy, bumping way up the stairs; it would take Rachel moments to reach her, and there are still two bullets left in the gun. Fish in a barrel. Girl on a staircase. If Rachel shot Sarah, she would fall all the way back down and land at Rachel’s feet again.

Instead Rachel, for reasons she does not understand, limps to the chair and sits down. Her mother’s blood is still staining the fabric. Rachel can’t stop shaking.

She watches her hands with mute disinterest, the way they are trembling so hard that every now and then they jump. Distantly she attempts to clock her own emotions. Adrenaline? Anger? Horror? Joy? She can’t tell. It’s disappointing to her, that she can’t tell.

Rachel closes her right hand into a fist, opens it. It is still shaking. She gives this up as a lost cause. _Stand up_ , she tells her body, but it’s learned over the last few months how not to stand and refuses to give up the lesson. Instead she sits there. Sarah reaches the top of the stairs. Sarah lurches out into the snow. Susan is unconscious on the ground. Rachel’s mind keeps slapping her with bright flickers of the last few minutes – her shaking hands and then Sarah on the ground and then her hands and then the delirious, nauseous shock of joy when she had shoved her cane into her mother’s side and the problem, the problem, the problem is that she hasn’t felt emotion that strong in such a long time that she doesn’t know what to do with it. Possibly that is why she is shaking: some sort of overload.

Is this shock? Is that what this is? Regrettable, the time spent reading mythology and not psychiatry. Athena is no help here.

Slowly, Rachel uncurls her right hand and lets the gun dangle almost-free. Slowly, she leans over and puts it on the table. She sighs. She wraps her hands around the head of her cane. If she could figure out what she was feeling she could stand up, she’s certain – whatever it is, it’s too strong for her to think around the edges of. It bleeds like ink. It’s strong and violent and shivering and she does not know what it is. She just doesn’t know.

Again she holds her hands out flat in front of her and watches them tremble, but: while she does this she lets herself move from this moment, and into the After.

She doesn’t want to. While she is sitting here this moment is still live as a wire, everything that has ever been too bloody for Rachel to want. When she remembers this she has it, again: the cane in her hand, Sarah howling, everything so bright it hurt her to look at, and – and the shivering ecstasy of knowing that she’d gone as far as she could possibly go and this was it, the turning point, and she had finally reached Sarah and clawed her down to the pit where Rachel was waiting for her. In that moment there was a pit, and Rachel was waiting in it, and she was composed entirely of teeth.

Now the moment is over. Or it will be, the second she stands up and lets herself move on from it. Absentmindedly Rachel reaches out light, shaking fingertips and touches the smear of blood on her top. Sarah’s or her mother’s? Either? Both?

She’s figured the feeling out, she thinks: it’s happiness. This thing in her chest and the tops of her wrists, her throat, her legs – that aching – the feeling she could and should break every piece of glass in this building, that’s happiness. It must be. It probably is. She hasn’t felt it in such a long time.

As Rachel mulls this realization over, her hands slowly stop shaking. So here she is, then. The After. The happiness – and it _must_ be happiness, that must be what it is – bleeds out through her fingers and out through the soles of her feet. She’s alone again.

Standing is easy, now – stupidly easy, the way it should have been for this entire time. She is sitting and then she isn’t. She is standing. She limps around the laboratory table and studies the curled-up figure of her mother on the ground. _Wake up_ , Rachel thinks viciously – not so they can talk, but so Susan can lie there on the ground and see Rachel not reach out a hand to help her up. That’s all Rachel wants. Just for Susan to see that.

Nothing. No movement. Imagine: shoving her cane into Susan’s abdomen again. Imagine: the way she’d scream. But the moment is over. It aches, how much it is over, how much Rachel would like it to come back so she could step inside of it and be that person again. It doesn’t. She doesn’t. She is going to have to move Susan; she can’t leave her slumped there on the floor. All of this blood will have to be cleaned. Rachel will have to change clothes, so that she can call the board and say _I’ve won_. So she can say _I’ve done it_. So she can say _look, look, look at what I’ve done_.

None of them will even know: that Sarah is carrying Rachel’s fresh wound, and that Rachel can decide whether Susan lives or dies. The blood is in the basement. No one will ever go down into the basement. The Rachel who would do these things, she’s in the basement too. Rachel is the only one who knows she’s there. Rachel is the only one who will ever love her and she does, she does. She carries that love at the center of her like an ember that doesn’t stop burning.

But she’s alone in it. She’s alone here. The happiness (and it must have been happiness) is completely gone, and it’s just her in the aching empty space of her own head. She feels the stupid urge to open her mouth and say _I won_ , just to make it true. Instead Rachel watches her mother sluggishly bleed for a few seconds more and then makes for the stairs. The knife is still there. It shines like a small star on the floor.

Rachel bends down, picks it up, and follows Sarah’s tracks up the stairs.

**Author's Note:**

> She’s got this aching heart  
> That just can’t wait to start breaking apart  
> Vacant parts of her body  
> To begin making art  
> Introducing its bloody sound to critics  
> And anybody wild that beats its sickness  
> To a bloody pulp  
> \--"Everything Floats," Dessa
> 
> SUCH a Rachel song. Listen to the whole song. It's such a Rachel song.
> 
> Anyways! Thanks for reading, please kudos + comment if you enjoyed. :)


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